De-Mystifying Modern Aca(DEM)ia: A Case Study in Chronic Soft Drinks

I recently came across a story about a woman named Marijuana Pepsi Vandyck. Mrs. Vandyck indicated in the story she did not want to change her name despite its patent ridiculousness. The article notes that she has a PhD in Higher Educational Leadership and works at the Community College of Baltimore County while also running “Action as Empowerment Center for Change.” She’s since moved on to work at Beloit College, where she directs a program for “first-generation, disabled and low-income students” and owns a “Performance Coaching Agency” as well. I’m unsure why she felt the need to render the type of agency as a proper noun.

Mrs. Vandyck wrote her doctoral dissertation on the discrimination that blacks face in education due to their unconventional names. This should strike anybody as obvious to the point it requires no explanation, let alone doctoral probing. While racial blank-slate-ism is the uncontested truth of the age, we still tend to accept that intelligence is up to 80% heritable from parents to offspring. The apple that fell off the illiterate tree is probably illiterate itself. This woman of questionable literacy is apparently famous enough, due to her highly unorthodox name, to warrant her own wikipedia article. I suppose her mother was correct when she told her that her, “name will take [her] around the world.”

How this woman’s doctoral inquiry relates to “leadership” is anyone’s guess. She’d have been better off peddling it in the sociology department, although I suppose one must still maintain a rudimentary understanding of statistics to practice sociology. Regardless, her adviser greenlit her research and Cardinal Stritch University approved it and gave her the coveted final sheepskin, presumably after she defended her thesis.

If the background of Mrs. Vandyck’s PhD strikes you as strange, join the club. It almost makes one yearn for the times when a PhD in “Education” was the laughingstock of the other non-medical doctors of academia. Yet, these odd fields have ballooned in quantity due to the lack of rigor in the programs and the dearth of intellectual capacity in the students.

Modern higher education is a complex game of “Monkey-See-Monkey-Do,” operating in parallel with the full Oscar Wilde quote that, “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.” It’s beyond question that the current crop of PhDs in the humanities are woefully mediocre intellects. A lot of them have even snuck into the sciences by getting stealth-humanities degrees in scientific fields such as “Computer Programming Management.”

These midwits would be bad enough if they were allowed to spout their half-baked ideas while waving their sheepskins around. But, if they had to explain their pedestrian views on the world in plain English, they’d find that most people not only easily understand the “insights” they painstakingly came to over the course of a masters and perhaps PhD program, but they can handily disprove them.

Academics in prior ages, or in rigorous “right answer/wrong answer” fields in modern times, don’t suffer from this constant humiliation. The midwit is forced to ponder why. The midwit finds Hegel and Heisenberg equally incomprehensible, yet lauded by academics and respected by the public (once their achievements have been explained to the average person). In fact, all of the bona fide intellectuals and their work are baffling to midwits and to the majority of the public. This stems from the complexity of their work. Complex ideas have complex explanations. The layman isn’t equipped to debate particle physics. Particle physicists find themselves generally unopposed (except by other particle physicists) when they present their findings about the world. Nobody contests their intellect.

And so, the midwit decides to make her work as incomprehensible and convoluted as possible. The problem is that none of her ideas are complex. In fact, the ideas are so ubiquitous and so transparently “obvious” that they’re the basis for all modern entertainment. One can understand Whig history in five minutes. The midwit has to find a way to dress up the Rousseauian [1] view of nature (don’t credit her with having read and understood Rousseau… she didn’t. She just copped the general idea from Eat, Pray, Love) in a way that makes peoples’ eyes glaze over and leads them to scratch their heads in confusion. After all, that’s the way she felt when she attempted to wrestle with actual intellectuals.

She starts making up or misusing words and using punctuation in ways that make sentences look like abstract algebraic equations. This is how you get papers like “Frag(men)tation: a Sym*bolic Dialectic Dis-cursive Analytica of Patriarchy’s Problemizing Role in Plate Tectonics.” If you manage to get a few paragraphs into what the Z Man refers to as “Xirl Science,” you’ll walk away with the notion that not only do you have no idea what the xirl is communicating in her work — but she doesn’t either.

I haven’t read Mrs. Vandyck’s dissertation. For all I know, it’s written in the classical style and comprehensible with a single and moderately brief reading by intelligent people. She is, however, part of the crop of pseudo-intellectuals who have relied on credentialism in lieu of intelligence and achievement. Her day job consists of elevating other non-aptitudinal students up the great pyramid scheme of higher education. Even if she doesn’t write like an ADHD-addled simpleton with a stuck hyphen key, the dullards she’s aiding in their educational journeys certainly will, at least if they want their musings published in contemporary publications.

As our university system continues to bleed credibility, I suppose one can take solace in the fact that the public is as unimpressed as the rest of us and that the only people who find the psychobabble permeating the humanities compelling are people who generate the psychobabble itself.

[1] Squaring the Whiggish march of progress with Rousseau’s contention that natural man has been degrading since he abandoned savagery sounds like a very difficult endeavor, but we tend to underestimate the capacity for cognitive dissonance in the thoroughly propagandized masses. Leftists all believe the savages of the Earth are more moral people than we are due to their closeness to nature while simultaneously believing that we are morally superior to the people of the 1950s (and the 1850s, and the 1050s) due to our perfection of liberal democracy and technological wonders.